A couple of themes kept recurring. One was confidence, and whether women might be held back because (generalising wildly
here) men tend to be more confident. I definitely have to steel myself to speak
in workshops or rehearsals, to ask for what I want, to think of myself
unapologetically as an artist, and (worst of all) to pitch. That’s one of the
reasons I love being a founder member of Agent 160, where one of our core aims
is to be mutually supportive, and where I feel part of a creative
community.

We also talked about what women make art about—whether we are encouraged to make
work from our own experience while men can write from outside theirs, whether
our work is seen as marginal and subjective while men’s is universal and
objective. The very first play I (co-)wrote, in a freshers’ festival at
university, came about because two men said they needed a woman to “write the
girls”. I owe them a massive debt for introducing me to theatre (if they
hadn’t, I’d still be trying and failing to be Sylvia Plath) but I also wish I’d
said “yes, but let’s all write all the characters".

Since then, my characters have included: a tree-sitter, thenovelist Joseph Roth, a fashion photographer puppet, an East Anglian wolf
biologist, Gertrude Bell, a Plaistow
boxer, a doubting rabbi, a Moldovan belly dancer, a grasping brothel madam, aninsomniac Shah.... I could go on. I have written about Iraqis, and Jews, and
people with seizures, and women, and people who live in north London, and
people who fancy the wrong kind of men, yes, so I have drawn on my own
experience, but I poured just as much of myself into writing the insomniac Shah
because that’s what writing is: an act of creative empathy.

When I told people I was doing an event on women and theatre
after The Hairy Ape, they all asked why. The testosterone-fuelled play, with a
mainly-male cast, and a key scene where they sweat it out in the hellish
stokehole of a transatlantic liner, seemed an odd counterpart to an event about
women. But as we sat on the stage and talked, it started to seem a really
radical choice. If women can direct plays like this (and with the guts and
energy Kate Budgen gave it) we must be getting somewhere.